Wes Anderson builds his latest film quite like the Mendl's bakery cakes that we find in the movie. The plot is baked into a story, baked into a tale, baked in a journey and possibly baked into a relationship. We'll take some time to pull back the layers, but we won't go any further as to ruin your own virgin experience. We will only suggest that this film is sugary sweet, and at the same time quite possibly the darkest and most blood soaked of all Anderson's films. So we might call this beautiful bit of storytelling, faux historical noir blood layer cake.
Let's just dedicate a moment to the neat bit of storytelling that occurs here. The movie is in fact a fictional book--baked in the mind of Wes Anderson--read by a young punk rocker. The book is a first person account of a conversation between two people, the author and a wealthy, through circumstance, owner of the Hotel Budapest. The conversation is a first person account and journey of the owner of the hotel from lobby boy to current owner. The first person account also chronicles the life and relationship built between the hotel lobby boy and the concierge.
The layering metaphor is furthered through a meal that takes place between the narrator of the book and the wealthy owner of the Hotel Budapest. As the courses of the meal occur, we progress through the story by aperitif, hors d'oevres, main course, dessert, and then digestif.
Can we make this any more complicated? Well, yes. But we'll simply summarize Anderson's ability to pull the story together with the image of the Mendl's bakery cakebox. The story is soft and sweet, baked in layers of pastel fondant, tiered ever so smaller with detail as it rises, placed in a sharp little box that collapses to reveal itself when you pull the ribbon that ties it together.
We'll leave it to you to dig your experiential fork into the moist inner cake to reveal those dark and blood soaked intricacies that we described in the first paragraph of this review. Bon Appetit.
karat y chop
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